I read a really fascinating piece on LitHub recently by Mark Harman, a Kafka translator. LitHub chose to title the piece “The Case for Renaming Kafka’s Metamorphosis as The Transformation” even though it’s actually an excerpt from an essay about Kafka translation much more broadly, and that single (admittedly, unusual and noteworthy) choice is just a small part. But it’s the splashiest part, so well done, LitHub. That’s clickbaiting done right.
Hartman writes:
Was my decision to entitle Kafka’s bug story The Transformation “brash, if not brassy,” as the writer Joy Williams asserts in the May 2024 issue of Harper’s Magazine? Surely not. It was Kafka himself, who, having translated a section of Ovid’s Metamorphoses at his rigorous Prague secondary school, did not call the bug story Die Metamorphose but rather Die Verwandlung.
The word “Verwandlung” held personal significance for Kafka, who uses it to describe changes that he perceives in some childhood photographs in a letter to Felice Bauer written while he was composing Die Verwandlung: “At that time I think I still belonged completely to myself, and seem to have been very content that way. As the eldest, I was photographed a lot and so there is a long series of transformations (Verwandlungen).”
I love this recusatio, although honestly, it has to be a little disingenuous, right? Obviously translating the title of “Kafka’s bug story” (amazing description, btw) as The Transformation is a bold move. I don’t know if “brassy” is exactly the word I’d use for it, but it’s not far off. It’s sort of a BDE translator move, honestly, to take a text with as well-established a translated title as The Metamorphosis and go back to the drawing board. The whole “Surely not. It was Kafka himself” rings a bit false to me. But I enjoy the attitude.
If I were a betting woman, I would say that even though I like Harman’s choice here — and I might even think it’s the correct choice, as a translator — I wouldn’t put money on it standing the test of time. I think The Metamorphosis as a title is here to stay, like it or not, as is The Brothers Karamazov, a title that feels extremely outdated but will probably stay frozen and never shift to the much more contemporary-feeling The Karamazov Brothers. (Or even just The Karamazovs?)
With that said, if a brave translator with enough rizz wants to come in and change some titles, here are a few that I badly think need an update.
The Apology
It will not surprise you to hear that, as an undiagnosed autistic 16-year-old, I had a rough time my first year of college. I was a mess. I immediately got involved with a guy four years older than me who had a girlfriend, let him pick the humanities and social studies sequences I was then stuck with for the rest of the year, and then spent the next few months in a state of sobbing, sloppy denial after he told me he was staying with his girlfriend. I was convinced we were meant to be together. (Although, amazingly, he and I did get together 15 years later, and have now been together for six years!! Sorry, 16-year-old Donna, you were just way ahead of your time.)
The one saving grace of that first year was that I had truly the perfect freshman roommate. She was so kind and smart and wonderful. Just an all-around lovely person, even when I was a total disaster.
We used to read each other’s essays and give notes, and I distinctly remember that one of her essays was about how the title of Plato’s Apology was disingenuous because it turns out that Socrates isn’t remotely apologetic. It’s probably a good thing that I hadn’t taken any Greek yet and didn’t yet know that apologia means something like “a formal defense of a position” in Greek and implies absolutely nothing like the word “apology” does in English, because I probably would have been insufferable about it. Then again, she was such a genuinely good human and student that she probably would have thanked me for helping her out.
This isn’t intended as a dunk on her at all, and not even on her professor. The humanities sequences at the University of Chicago are taught in a New Criticism model, which is to say, there isn’t much emphasis on placing texts in their social and historical context. You’re reading for form and ideas. If your professor happens to know about the social and political context, you better bet you’re going to hear about it, but they’re covering thousands of years of literary history and they don’t know about everything.
So the blame goes not to my roommate or the underpaid adjunct who was teaching her, but to literally hundreds of years of lazy translators who have been content to let this misleading title stand. A brave translator would title the text something like Socrates Represents Himself in Court, Like One of Those Morons in Law & Order Who Ignore the Advice of the Judge. Spoiler Alert: He Gets Convicted and Executed. It may seem like a stretch, but everything in my title actually happened, unlike Apology. Do it, you cowards.
Oedipus Rex
This one, admittedly, is a bit of a low-key obsession of mine, because what asshole is responsible for the insertion of a random Latin word into the Greek title? One of the shibboleths of the discipline of classics is that you will never, ever hear a classicist refer to this text as Oedipus Rex. Only stuck-up English majors who want to sound fancy do that. Actual classics people will always refer to it by either its proper title, Oedipus Tyrannos, or just as Oedipus, because let’s face it: everybody knows which of the two plays titled Oedipus you’re talking about. Only the most pedantic asshole will say, “I’m sorry, are you referring to Oedipus Coloneus, the unloved play nobody ever reads and clear loser of the the so-called Theban trilogy (although we educated people all know isn’t actually a trilogy, of course, but rather three plays written and performed separately over a period of decades)?” Look, we can be a pretty obnoxious bunch, but nobody is that obnoxious.
But because I’m not not obnoxious, I also need to take this soapbox moment to point out that “tyrannos” is a really specific and brilliant word here, because tyrannoi were typically not hereditary kings, so Oedipus is considered a tyrannos because he became king after he defeated the Sphinx. Although of course he is also a hereditary king, much to his horror. So the title itself encapsulates the fundamental tragic irony of the play and the mismatch in knowledge and viewpoint between the characters and the audience. “Rex” could never.
Suppliant Women
“Which Suppliant Women do you mean, Donna? Aren’t there several?” Yes. Yes there are. Most Greek tragedies and comedies are titled based on their choruses, and, as you might guess, there were a number of plays where the chorus was a group of women begging a man to help them out against another man or group of men trying to do something terrible to them. Just a cool, fun reminder. And let’s not forget that all these plays were written by men and performed by men for a male audience and likely don’t reflect actual empathy for actual women, but rather a way to process some complex feelings about socially constructed gender norms in a safe space before returning to everyday patriarchal bullshit. These plays deserve new titles, and women deserve better, period.
Bonus Round: A Play Renamed Correctly
Plays that weren’t named after their choruses are usually named after the protagonist. “Protagonist” (first actor) is a technical term here — the lead actor played the character with the most lines, like Medea or Oedipus, while the deuteragonist (second actor) played a cast of characters brought on to disagree with or challenge them, and then the tritagonist (third actor) played a number of usually-unnamed messengers with bit parts. This means that the protagonist of the play we call Antigone played Creon, and indeed, early records suggest that might have been the show’s original name. However, Antigone is the character we all care about most, and it’s definitely her play. I’m glad this one stuck.
Readers, are there any texts whose titles fill you with inarticulate rage? Share in the comments!
Taplin calls Women of Trachis ‘Deianira’. That seems right to me.
I have encountered versions of Oedipus that were titled “Oedipus the King” which does seem like a fair cop since they are, y’know, translating into English. Nobody is saying either “rex” or “tyrannos” in the actual text, and this clarifies that the first part is a name while the second is a title/role.